Graphics manufacturers have been releasing overclocked versions of video cards for some now, giving an out of the box overclocked boost from other graphics cards on the market to gain an extra few frames per second. More often than not though this change isn't too substantial but now and then we'll see a mid-range card with the help of a some extra cooling and overclocking bring in excellent numbers and a great value. The Visiontek Radeon HD 3850 Black Edition looks to be one of these cards. Let's take a closer look.

We'll give a quick recap of the RV670 GPU core from ATI and AMD which is featured in the new Radeon HD 3870 and HD 3850. The first major change over the R600 is the manufacturing process is now 55nm, 30nm less than the 2900 XT which alone would solve a few of the major problems with the R600, power consumption and heat. That does exactly as the new 3000 series of cards use less power than even comparable Nvidia cards and also run cooler than the 2900 XT. This smaller process allows for higher clockspeeds although the normal clockspeed of the 3850 is 670MHz for the core Visiontek bumps this up to 700MHz for this overclocked Black edition, although this is still 75Mhz slower than 3870. The memory runs at 1.75GHz effective, about 900Mhz more than a standard 3850 and about 400Mhz less than a 3870. The number of stream processors though remain the same on all products at 320. We'll see how much a performance difference this makes later on. To achieve this higher clockspeed Visiontek's HD 3850 Black edition does away with the one slot cooler of a normal 3850 and uses a larger dual slot cooler similar to what is seen on a 3870 but with a larger fan, heatsink, and a few heatpipes throw on to boot.

Other new features include PCI-Express 2.0, support for the new DirectX 10.1 spec, finally the UVD chip for decoding of H.264, MPEG2, and more onboard the higher-end products, PowerPlay power saving features, and the ability to run Quad Crossfire with new 790FX motherboards.

Here are the specifications from Visiontek.

* Powered by ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD3870
* Dual Link DVI-I x2 with full resolution HDCP Support
* 512MB Ultra High Speed GDDR4 Memory
* x16 PCI Express
* PCI Express® 2.0 & 1.0 support
* Superscalar unified shader architecture
* ATI Avivoâ„¢ HD display enhancement technology
* ATI PowerPlayâ„¢ energy conserving technology
* DirectX® 10.1 / Shader Model 4.1 support
* Dual DVI-I, TV/Component HDTV
* Built-in HDMI Video and 5.1 audio
* Support for the ATI Radeonâ„¢ DVI to HDMI adapter
* Unified Video Decoder (UVD) for Blu-rayâ„¢ and HD DVD

Box Contents

* ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 3870 graphics card
* ATI CrossFireXâ„¢ Bridge Interconnect
* DVI to HDMI adapter
* DVI to VGA adapter
* HDTV Component out adapter
* Set-up CD
* Manuals

Supported Operating Systems

* Windows Vista (all versions)
* Windows XP
* Windows XP Media Center Edition

System Requirements

* Intel® Pentium® 4, Celeron, AMD™ Athlon™ 64, AMD™ Athlon XP™, Sempron or compatible• PCI Express® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard
* 450 Watt or greater power supply with 75 Watt 6-pin PCI Express® power connector recom-mended (550 Watt and two 6-pin connectors for ATI CrossFireX™)
* Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products
* 1GB of system memory• Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
* DVD playback requires DVD drive
* Blu-rayâ„¢ / HD DVD playback requires Blu-ray / HD DVD drive
* For a complete ATI CrossFireXâ„¢ system, a second ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 3850 graphics card, an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one ATI CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable per board (included) are required